Company:
USAA Labs
Year:
2021
Duration:
5 months
My Role:
UX/UI Designer
The Work:
Heuristic Evaluation
User Flow
Hi-Fidelity Wireframes
Greetings! As the nature of this work is confidential, I won’t be able to show any project visuals for the time being. However, I can provide a description of the design process and how I solved the problem.
Project Summary
I was assigned to a research team as the UX Designer to help them recommend a solution to a member facing digital navigation tool that would promote confidence in digital self service and reduce simple servicing transactions. Unfortunately, the current vendor product was falling short of meeting our operational and technical goals, making it soon unusable. We needed to leverage previous research, recommend new vendor solutions and provide additional insights for overall tool improvement.
The team was in the Ideate phase of this project I needed to help them identify what the business partners are dealing with and learn more about the problem and understand their members pain points.
I did a heuristic evaluation of the tool as a customer by pretending to be a customer. Technically I am a customer of USAA so the only pretending I did was to be less tech-savvy. This allowed me to observe how well the tool worked and observe quietly as I struggled to use the tool.
“The tool’s link location to initiate required members to use there recall memory to find it causing frustration and reluctance to use the tool.”
“Provide a more seamless experience for initiating the tool.”
I provided illustration UI improvement recommendations for each platform based on the pain points I experienced during the heuristic evaluation. I wrote down the impact of these recommendation and what I believed we could do to the improve the overall performance and usage of the tool.
I put all the data together so we could refine it when we reviewed it as a team for the presentation.
They decided to keep me on the team through the next phase of the project as their UI Designer!
After we completed presentation our business decided to move forward with the proof of concept phase! They decided to keep me on the team and continue to be their UI Designer to help them create a Proof of Concept. I created a User Flow to help the developer get up to speed on the best experience possible for our members and the pain points we are trying to avoid repeating. I am currently designing the wireframes in Adobe XD for our developers based on our vendors capabilities within a closed environment. The dev team was available to start immediately and we got the trial agreement signed so we could start testing.
I started to learn about the new vendor our director brought in and started building low-fidelity wireframes based on their capabilities. Once our research engineer and solution architect confirmed my low-fidelity wireframes meet their requirements I was able to move to Hi-Fidelity wireframes.
Next Steps
We will test out the new launch point, work with vendor to determine UI, understand tech limitations, address previous security concerns, leverage site feedback engage employees for usability run through. Ultimately understand tech and what if would take to implement at USAA across the whole enterprise.
Lessons & TakeAways
I learned I have to think outside the box to complete research in a timely manner. Especially when you can’t meet them in person due to covid restrictions.
I learned how to share work with my agile team while work 100% remote.
How to build decks based on research data and share it with your stakeholders for feedback.
When structuring wireframes try to help the developers at the POC stage easily understand what page they are building and the CSS to build it properly.
Ask your Tech Lead before you start your Hi-Fi wireframes what format their developer team prefers.
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Gerald Wright, wrightux.com
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